The saucy love letters of wartime sweethearts

London - Full of tenderness and longing, the love letters between two wartime sweethearts are from a more innocent age.

Then again, maybe not that innocent after all.

Among the 300 letters written between surgeon Brian Thomas and nurse Katie Walker as they waited to be reunited at the end of the Second World War, are some very saucy exchanges indeed.

The strength of their passion is laid bare in a stash of faded letters found hidden in a chest of drawers. Their constant endearments and promises of love are sprinkled with rather more risque declarations.

At one point Miss Walker writes that she is so glum and ill-tempered living without her love that he would have to spank her if he was there, adding mischievously: “but what a heavenly spanking!”

Mr Thomas later tells the girl he nicknamed Boofuls that he was delighted to hear she was making herself a new pair of knickers.

“Boofuls, I loved a bit of your letter when you said you were building some special undies for when our future comes,” he wrote.

“I’m sure they are lovely and I swear I’ll handle you as gently as if you were a piece of Dresden china when you’ve got them on. And I promise we won’t have a ripping time.”

Mr Thomas met Miss Walker in Graz, Austria, while he was posted abroad with the Royal Army Medical Corps, after his marriage collapsed when his wife had an affair. He proposed to his new love on a moonlit bridge in 1945, having promised to start divorce proceedings, but was demobbed and returned to Britain eight months before the war ended.

Miss Walker stayed on in Graz so they began writing to each other every day, their missives often decorated with hand-drawn love hearts and always sealed with a kiss.

Mr Thomas, who in keeping with the times wanted to divorce his adulterous wife without bringing shame and embarrassment on her, went through the charade of checking into a hotel with an actress for the night so he could be blamed for the separation.

He married Miss Walker in 1947 as soon as his divorce came through.

About 300 of the love letters were found by their daughter Loraine Fergusson in her mother’s drawer after she died aged 88.

And now the letters have been made public on a website dedicated to her parents’ enduring love. Mrs Fergusson, 61, an author, of Didcot, Oxfordshire, said: “It was exciting because I didn’t know what was in them. I am transcribing one a day and learning a lot about the early stages of my parent’s love affair.

“At times it can be a bit like reading Shades of Grey. The fact that my father was married and had to get a divorce makes it so exciting.

“They also give an extraordinary window into life at the end of the war as men and women put their lives back together and strove to fulfil the dreams they had of a happy future.” Mr Thomas had married his girlfriend Kit just two weeks before being posted abroad in 1942.

But after a year patching up injured British soldiers in Algiers and the Middle East the then 34-year-old came home to discover his wife had met someone else.

He returned heartbroken to his duties in Italy, then to Graz where he and Miss Walker, 23, fell in love.

In one of his letters he told her: “I still can’t (and never will) get over the incredible miracle of you loving me…?Isn’t it amazing that a love like we’ve got can actually make one happy though we’re apart?”

Miss Walker’s messages reveal her unswerving loyalty despite the attention of other servicemen.

In one she tells of a party in the Sisters’ Mess where there were “three men to every girl”, but adds: “Oh my darling one, how much I missed you, you can never guess, it’s always so much worse when I am at a party and surrounded by people.”

The couple settled in Hereford, where they had Loraine and a son, Peter. Mr Thomas worked as an orthopaedic surgeon at the city’s hospital until his retirement in 1975. He died seven years later at the age of 72.

But it was not until his wife’s death in 2009 that the letters, and dozens of fading black and white photographs, were found.

Mrs Fergusson said: “My father died when I was 29 but there was never any doubt they were still madly in love with each other.

“As a child you take your parents’ relationship for granted but I never heard them argue and they were always laughing.” - Daily Mail

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